My grandson, Lyman, and I have been into rocks lately. We had one rock that we thought might contain some iron and so we tested its density against ordinary granite. If there is iron in the rock, it should be much denser than granite. The procedure is interesting and probably not what you are expecting.
Note: ChatGPT told us how to do this. Thank you AI.
I’m just having a devil of a time wrapping my head around a 75% chance of getting 1/20 of an inch of rain. Help me please!
The trick is that 75% and 0.05 inch are answering two completely different questions. And weather apps don’t make that distinction especially intuitive.
Your screenshot is saying:
75% = How likely is it that you get measurable rain at some point today?
0.05″ = If you add up the rain expected over the next 24 hours, roughly how much is forecast?
So, the forecast is essentially: “We’re fairly confident you’ll get wet, but we’re also fairly confident you won’t get very wet.”
Think of a brief shower. Suppose a shower passes over your farm at noon and drops 0.05 inch in 15–20 minutes. That’s only about 1/20 inch—barely enough to settle the dust and wet everything down. Yet it absolutely counts as a rainy event.
Note: ChatGPT continues for another page or two, blah, blah, blah…
I cannot even measure 1/20 of an inch. This apparently makes more sense to a machine than it does to a human.
The computer has no trouble saying “0.05 inch” because its weather model produces a numerical estimate.
Note: ChatGPT continues for another page or two, blah, blah, blah…
You’re the machine I was talking about.
Touché. 😄
My good friend, Terrell, said, “When you are in the dark you make bad decisions.”
His remark reminded me of the time several of us took our horses on a ride that would take two days to get to our destination. We wanted to go as far as possible on the first day and perhaps waited too long before we stopped to camp. In fact, there was no moon or stars or anything and so when we finally stopped it was pitch dark. We tied the horses to some trees and mostly by feel rolled out our bedrolls and went to sleep.
Sometime during the night, we were awakened by the ground shaking and a tremendous noise made by a very fast-moving train just a few feet from where we were sleeping. The horses went berserk and it seemed the train would never end. It had been so dark we had no idea.
That is almost too perfect an illustration of Terrell’s remark.
What makes the story work is that you didn’t make an obviously foolish decision. The problem was that darkness had removed a crucial piece of information.
Your story adds another wrinkle: sometimes you don’t discover that you made a bad decision until the train arrives.
Please let me know the extent that science supports this guy’s claims, and show me your sources.
There is real science behind extra-virgin olive oil and olive polyphenols, including hydroxytyrosol. But the advertisement you showed me stretches that science considerably—especially the phrases “fight fat,” “skyrocket energy,” and “radiant, ‘lit-from-within’ glow.”
The important distinction is between “olive oil is a healthy food”, which has substantial evidence behind it, and “this unusually high-polyphenol olive oil produces these dramatic effects,” for which the evidence is much thinner.
| Claim in the ad | What the evidence says |
|---|---|
| “30x more hydroxytyrosol” | Possibly true as a chemical measurement, but misleading without context. Gundry says this comparison is based on a 2004 survey of Mediterranean olive oils. It does not mean 30× the health benefit. |
| “Fight fat” | Some evidence, but nowhere near strong enough for the impression the ad gives. |
| “Skyrocket energy” | Poorly supported. There is some recent evidence concerning fatigue, but not evidence that this particular oil dramatically increases energy. |
| “Radiant, lit-from-within glow” | Essentially advertising language. There is interesting research on olive polyphenols and skin, but it doesn’t establish that drinking this oil gives people glowing skin. |
| General cardiovascular benefits | This is where the science is strongest, although the evidence largely concerns EVOO/Mediterranean diets rather than Gundry’s particular product. |
I wouldn’t dismiss this one completely.
A meta-analysis of 11 randomized trials found that diets enriched with olive oil produced about 0.9 kg (2 lb) greater weight reduction than control diets, along with small reductions in waist circumference.
There’s also a small randomized trial of hydroxytyrosol itself. Twenty-nine overweight/obese women received 5 mg, 15 mg, or placebo for six months. The 15-mg group showed significantly greater weight and visceral-fat loss at four weeks—but importantly, the advantage diminished at 12 and 24 weeks. That’s interesting preliminary evidence, not convincing evidence of a sustained fat-loss treatment.
Another small placebo-controlled study found that 15 mg/day of hydroxytyrosol produced a statistically significant change in weight—but the actual change was only about 0.46% over three weeks.
And one trial in 41 women on a calorie-restricted diet found greater fat loss when 25 mL/day of EVOO replaced soybean oil. That supports EVOO as a potentially useful dietary fat; it doesn’t establish olive oil as a weight-loss drug.
So “may have modest favorable effects on body composition” would be defensible. “Fight fat” makes that evidence sound considerably more impressive than it is.
This is where I become skeptical.
There is a very recent randomized trial worth knowing about. In 102 people with metabolic syndrome, a concentrated olive-polyphenol supplement produced improvements in several measures after 12 weeks, including glucose, HbA1c, BMI, blood pressure and self-reported fatigue scores.
That’s genuinely interesting research.
But one study of a 10-mg/day concentrated olive-polyphenol extract in people with metabolic syndrome is a long way from demonstrating that Gundry olive oil “skyrockets energy.” Fatigue scores aren’t the same thing as energy production, exercise performance or vitality, and this wasn’t a trial of the product in your advertisement.
I wouldn’t regard “skyrocket energy” as scientifically established.
There is some fascinating research here too—but notice what was actually tested.
A randomized clinical study involving 70 people found improvement in measured wrinkles from olive-derived polyphenols (oleocanthal and oleacein). But participants put a 1% formulation directly on their skin twice daily. They didn’t eat olive oil.
So that’s evidence that certain olive polyphenols might have interesting topical dermatological effects. It isn’t evidence that taking a tablespoon of Gundry olive oil produces a “lit-from-within glow.”
This shouldn’t obscure the fact that olive oil has quite respectable nutritional science behind it.
The large PREDIMED study involved 7,447 people at high cardiovascular risk. Participants assigned to a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil had fewer major cardiovascular events than those assigned to the control diet. There were some important problems with the original randomization, which led to withdrawal and republication of the study; the revised analysis still found a cardiovascular benefit.
The FDA also permits a qualified health claim for oils rich in oleic acid. Its wording is much more restrained than Gundry’s advertising: supportive but not conclusive evidence suggests that about 1½ tablespoons (20 g) daily, when replacing fats higher in saturated fat and without increasing total calories, may reduce coronary-heart-disease risk.
There’s also evidence that higher-polyphenol olive oils affect oxidative biology. In a randomized crossover trial, high-polyphenol EVOO reduced oxidized LDL and increased antioxidant capacity within the high-polyphenol treatment period, although the researchers found no significant between-treatment differences in the overall sample.
And this is especially interesting: in 2025 the European Food Safety Authority did a comprehensive assessment of whether olive-oil phenolic compounds could be said to lower LDL cholesterol or systolic blood pressure. After reviewing the intervention studies, EFSA concluded that a cause-and-effect relationship had not been established for either outcome.
That’s a useful antidote to the marketing.
Gundry’s own site currently makes the same claim: “30x more hydroxytyrosol than regular olive oil.” The footnote says that it is “based on [a] 2004 study of extra virgin olive oil samples from the Mediterranean.”
That’s quite different from demonstrating:
People consuming our oil get 30× the health benefit of ordinary EVOO.
It doesn’t demonstrate that at all.
Polyphenol concentration in olive oil naturally varies enormously with olive variety, ripeness, growing conditions, extraction, storage and other factors. And even if his oil really contains 30 times as much hydroxytyrosol as whatever comparison oils were selected, biological effects don’t necessarily increase linearly with concentration.
Advertising version:
“30x more hydroxytyrosol … fight fat, skyrocket energy, and trigger a radiant glow.”
Evidence-based version:
“Extra-virgin olive oil is a healthy unsaturated fat, and olive polyphenols such as hydroxytyrosol have biologically interesting antioxidant effects. Mediterranean dietary patterns containing EVOO have good evidence for cardiovascular benefit. Preliminary human studies suggest concentrated olive polyphenols may have additional metabolic effects, but evidence that a particular high-polyphenol olive oil causes meaningful weight loss, dramatically increases energy, or improves skin appearance when consumed is currently limited.”
That’s a considerably less exciting advertisement.
One other point jumps out at me from your screenshot: the testimonials aren’t scientific evidence at all. Howard’s claims about neuropathy and Nancy’s claims about digestion, skin and hunger are individual anecdotes. They could be perfectly sincere and still tell us essentially nothing about whether the oil caused those changes.
So I wouldn’t call the underlying product snake oil. EVOO is a genuinely healthful food, and hydroxytyrosol is a genuinely interesting compound. What I would say is that the advertising is running considerably faster than the science.
The sources above include the company’s own current claims, FDA, EFSA, PubMed-indexed randomized trials, and the large PREDIMED trial, so you can click through them and see exactly what was actually studied.
In his YouTube advertising, he has some really bad things to say about “seed” oils, such as you should never put anything into your body that is used as a lubricant or engine fuel, et cetera. Please respond.
Yes. That particular argument is much easier to evaluate than some of the claims about his olive oil, because there is a large body of human nutrition research on the subject.
The scientific evidence does not support a blanket claim that seed oils are harmful or should never be eaten. In fact, when seed oils replace fats high in saturated fat, the evidence generally points in the opposite direction: LDL cholesterol falls and cardiovascular risk tends to improve.
The argument you remember from his advertisement — don’t eat something that can also be used to lubricate machinery or fuel an engine — is rhetorically effective but scientifically meaningless.
Consider the same reasoning applied elsewhere. Ethanol can fuel an engine, but ethanol is also the alcohol in wine. Water is used as an industrial coolant. Baking soda cleans machinery. Citric acid is an industrial chemical. Olive oil itself has historically been used as a lubricant and fuel, particularly as lamp fuel. None of those industrial applications tells us whether the substance is healthy to consume.
What matters is dose, composition, contaminants, metabolism and demonstrated effects in humans, not whether engineers have found another use for the substance.
There are actually several different arguments bundled together, and a couple contain a kernel of legitimate science.
Seed oils such as soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower and canola contain substantial amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids, particularly the omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid. The human body can use linoleic acid to produce arachidonic acid, which in turn can be used to make some inflammatory signaling molecules.
From that biochemical pathway comes a plausible-sounding argument:
More seed oil → more omega-6 → more arachidonic acid → more inflammation → more chronic disease.
The trouble is that when researchers actually give humans more linoleic acid and measure inflammatory markers, that predicted result generally doesn’t occur. Controlled feeding studies have not shown that increasing dietary linoleic acid increases arachidonic acid or inflammatory markers in the way the hypothesis predicts.
That’s an important distinction: a plausible biochemical mechanism isn’t the same thing as demonstrating harm in people.
The American Heart Association reviewed this issue and continues to recommend polyunsaturated fats, including omega-6 fats, as replacements for saturated fat. It specifically addresses the internet claim that seed oils cause inflammation and chronic disease and says the evidence doesn’t support it.
This part sometimes gets lost because the two sides argue past one another.
Repeatedly heating cooking oil to very high temperatures—think restaurant deep fryers operating for extended periods—can oxidize fats and generate degradation products. That’s real chemistry, and repeatedly reused frying oil isn’t something I’d describe as desirable.
But it doesn’t follow that sautéing vegetables at home in a tablespoon of canola or sunflower oil is therefore dangerous. Harvard’s review makes exactly this distinction: repeatedly heated frying oils are a legitimate concern, while the evidence does not establish ordinary seed-oil consumption as harmful.
There’s another enormous confounder here. Americans get a lot of seed oil in French fries, potato chips, doughnuts, cookies, crackers, fast food and other highly processed foods.
People who eat lots of those foods often have worse health.
That doesn’t establish:
seed oil → poor health.
The package containing the seed oil also contains some combination of refined starch, sugar, salt and lots of calories, and may be deep-fried. Harvard researchers specifically warn against attributing the health consequences of that dietary pattern to the seed oil itself.
He’s selling you an alternative.
The scientific comparison isn’t:
Gundry olive oil versus dangerous industrial seed oil.
A much more useful comparison would be:
Extra-virgin olive oil versus ordinary olive oil versus canola/soybean/corn/sunflower oil versus butter/lard/tallow.
Now we have a lot of evidence.
I would happily put extra-virgin olive oil near the top of my choices for an everyday culinary fat. It has an excellent evidence base, as we discussed before.
But that doesn’t make the other vegetable oils poisonous.
And if the choice is something like canola oil versus butter or beef tallow, replacing the saturated fat with polyunsaturated vegetable oil is supported by substantial evidence. WHO reviewed systematic reviews of randomized trials and observational studies and concluded with moderate-certainty evidence that replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats reduces cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease risk. WHO consequently issued a strong recommendation favoring polyunsaturated fats from plant sources as a replacement for saturated fats.
The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines reach essentially the same conclusion.
I wouldn’t turn the tables and claim “seed oils are wonderfully healthy and the more the better.”
That’s making the same mistake in the opposite direction.
Oil is extremely calorie dense. Eating large amounts of fried and ultra-processed foods isn’t a good idea. Frequently reused frying oils are undesirable. Whole sources of unsaturated fat—nuts, seeds, fish, avocados, etc.—bring nutrients besides their oil. And there’s quite good evidence specifically supporting EVOO as part of a Mediterranean dietary pattern.
So choosing EVOO as your primary cooking/dressing oil is perfectly reasonable.
What the evidence doesn’t justify is being frightened of the tablespoon of canola oil used to cook dinner.
And I think you’ve identified something important about that advertisement. “Don’t put engine lubricant in your body” isn’t a scientific argument at all. It substitutes an unpleasant mental image—motor oil—for evidence about human nutrition. Ironically, olive oil itself defeats the argument: olive oil has been used for thousands of years as lamp fuel and lubricant. Its ability to lubricate something doesn’t make it any less edible.
That distinction also makes me somewhat more cautious about the other claims in the ad you showed me. When someone has good evidence available, there’s little reason to resort to the “would you put engine fuel in your body?” style of argument.
As I pretty much expected but wanted some science to support: some things never change.
Exactly. The details change—seed oils, toxins, superfoods, polyphenols—but the sales technique is ancient.
What makes this one effective is that it starts with several true facts: EVOO is a good dietary fat; hydroxytyrosol is biologically active; repeatedly overheated oils can degrade; and excessive ultra-processed food is associated with poor health. Then it quietly makes the leap from those facts to “therefore ordinary seed oils are dangerous, and my unusually expensive olive oil is the solution.”
The science supports the first part much better than the leap.
And “you wouldn’t put engine fuel in your body” is a particularly nice example of rhetoric masquerading as chemistry. As you suspected, asking the mundane question “What happens when humans actually eat the stuff?” is much more informative.
When I was young my dad gave me a small booklet by a Professor Berry on how to train my horse. One of the first steps was to lay the horse on the ground with its feet tied so it couldn’t get up. The horse would struggle to regain control but eventually relinquish. This step is repeated until the horse is completely submissive.
More recently, I had a goat that I put through Professor Berry training. He became so submissive that when it was time to trim his hooves, he would lay down and voluntarily on his own lift one leg at a time for me to work on.
That is a fascinating example because it sits right at the intersection of old-fashioned “submission” training and what we would now describe as learned responses, habituation, and trust.
Professor Berry’s method sounds like one of the old restraint-based horse-training systems sometimes called throwing, laying down, or horse taming. The theory was essentially what you remember: deprive the horse temporarily of its ability to escape, let it discover that struggling accomplishes nothing, and repeat the experience until resistance disappears. Similar ideas turn up in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century horse-training literature.
Your goat, though, is the more interesting case. If he eventually lay down voluntarily and presented his feet one at a time, something more had happened than simple physical submission. He had apparently learned the entire sequence:
Brad approaches → this is hoof-trimming time → lying down is what we do → each foot gets handled → nothing bad happens.
And there is an important distinction there. An animal that has merely been overpowered may freeze or cease resisting. An animal that anticipates the procedure and performs the useful behaviors before being physically compelled has learned a cooperative routine. Your goat seems to have crossed that line rather spectacularly.
Modern animal behavior people would probably be uncomfortable with Berry’s initial restraint procedure because forced recumbency can cause fear, stress, injury, and—in badly handled cases—something resembling learned helplessness. Today a trainer would normally try to obtain the same final behavior incrementally with pressure-and-release or positive reinforcement rather than physically immobilizing the animal.
But that doesn’t make your observation uninteresting; quite the opposite. The method and the eventual relationship aren’t necessarily the same thing. Whatever happened during the original restraint, your goat subsequently accumulated a great deal of experience showing that when you handled him, there was no reason to fight you. Eventually the animal wasn’t simply allowing hoof trimming. He was participating in it.
And I suspect Professor Berry would have described that in one word—submission—whereas a modern behaviorist might need several paragraphs to distinguish submission, habituation, conditioning, predictability, and cooperative behavior.
The goat probably didn’t care what either of them called it. He had figured out the procedure and was ready to get on with it.
Yes, I had a friend whose horse bit him while the horse was on the ground, and my friend was in a leg cast for quite some time.
And that is almost the perfect counterpoint to the goat story.
A horse that has been put on the ground is not harmless merely because it has lost the use of its legs. It still has a head, neck, teeth, and considerable reach. Your friend’s experience makes the old Professor Berry method considerably less quaint: the horse bit him badly enough that he ended up immobilized afterward.
There is also a rather nice farm-story irony in it:
Professor Berry’s method was supposed to teach the horse that struggling was futile. Your friend’s horse apparently hadn’t read the booklet.
That anecdote might actually improve One Foot at a Time. It prevents the story from becoming an endorsement of the old technique. You can simply report what Berry taught, what happened with your goat, and then what happened to your friend. The contrast does the work without needing an explanation of modern animal-training theory.
And it gives you another very farm-like lesson: the same technique that produced a goat who politely handed you his feet produced a horse who put a man in a cast.
Here’s my arguments against gambling. First, it is a zero sum game among the players. This means that for one to win, others must lose. In fact, in a football or basketball game, the pie is a one for one such that for every winner there is one, and only one loser. But with gambling, such as in a lottery, it maximizes the number of losers for each winner. And, the house takes its slice of the pie without ever sharing, thus actually reducing the size of the pie.
That is a coherent economic argument, and I think there is an important distinction buried in it that makes it stronger.
Strictly speaking, gambling is not merely zero-sum; commercial gambling is generally negative-sum for the gamblers as a group. Your pie analogy captures that nicely.
Suppose 100 people each put $10 into a lottery. There is a $1,000 pie. If the entire $1,000 were awarded to one player, the game would be zero-sum: collectively the players neither gained nor lost anything. One person gained $990 net, while the other 99 lost $10 each.
But suppose the lottery operator keeps $400 and pays $600 in prizes. Now the players as a group put in $1,000 and get back only $600. The players collectively must lose $400. The question isn’t whether they will lose; it is only which individuals will bear the losses and which lucky few will escape them with a gain.
Your comparison with football or basketball is interesting, but I’d sharpen it slightly. A football game is zero-sum with respect to winning the contest: one team’s victory necessarily means the other’s defeat (setting aside ties). Gambling takes that competitive structure and attaches transfers of wealth to it. A large lottery then creates something quite different: one winner can require thousands or millions of losing bets.
That leads to what I think is the philosophically strongest version of your objection:
Gambling does not create the wealth that constitutes the prize. It redistributes wealth among the gamblers, deliberately arranging for many people to lose so that a few can win, while the operator removes part of the money in the process.
There is, however, one important counterargument someone defending gambling could make. People may be buying entertainment, not merely an investment. If I pay $10 for a movie, I don’t complain that my expected financial return is negative $10. A lottery player might similarly say, “I paid $2 for the pleasure of imagining what I’d do with $500 million.”
That doesn’t defeat your argument, but it changes where the real disagreement lies. If gambling is treated as an investment, its negative-sum character is devastating. If it is treated as entertainment, then the harder question becomes whether the entertainment people receive justifies a system whose financial mechanism necessarily produces substantially more losing money than winning money.
And I suspect you have additional arguments, because this one addresses the economic structure of gambling but not yet its effects on behavior, families, or society.
Thanks for the “entertainment” argument because this is another related problem as I see it, that is gambling, if it is entertainment, comes at the expense of other people. I don’t want my entertainment to have that characteristic. I could simply pick my own lottery number without paying for it and gain entertainment by seeing if it wins. But then, people would say I’m missing the anticipation of winning money. Ah, exactly–I’m entertained at the prospect of gaining other people’s money not just having predicted the right number.
Yes. You’ve identified a useful distinction that the standard “gambling is entertainment” defense tends to blur.
Your imaginary lottery is a clever test. Suppose tonight’s lottery number will be 17-24-31-38-42-6. You choose six numbers beforehand, write them down, and watch the drawing. You still have uncertainty, anticipation, suspense, and the pleasure of discovering whether you guessed correctly. What you have removed is the financial payoff.
If someone responds, “But that’s no fun because you can’t win anything,” they’ve conceded something important: the uncertainty alone wasn’t the entertainment. The prospect of acquiring money was part of the entertainment. And in a conventional lottery, that money comes overwhelmingly from people whose bets lose.
I would make one qualification, because it actually strengthens your argument. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a lottery player consciously thinks, I hope all those other people lose so I can take their money. Psychologically, almost nobody frames it that way. They think, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I won $50 million? The institutional structure hides the other half of the transaction.
And that gives your argument a rather interesting form:
The lottery separates the pleasure of receiving someone else’s losses from the experience of causing those losses.
The winner doesn’t see 10 million disappointed people handing over a few dollars each. He sees an enormous check. The losers don’t see themselves transferring money to a particular winner; they see themselves buying tickets. Yet economically those are two sides of the same arrangement, minus the operator’s cut.
There is still a serious counterargument. A gambler could say: “Yes, my winnings come from other players, but they voluntarily entered exactly the same bargain I did. I consented to possibly fund their winnings, and they consented to possibly fund mine. So there is nothing objectionable about the transfer.”
I think that’s a much stronger defense than “it’s entertainment,” because it meets your argument rather than sidestepping it. Your objection then becomes an ethical question about whether mutual consent is sufficient to make an activity desirable when the activity’s attraction depends partly upon an intentionally unequal redistribution among its participants.
And your hypothetical lottery gives you a particularly good way of getting there. It asks a surprisingly revealing question:
If the fun is guessing the winning number, why does taking away the money take away so much of the fun?
The answer tells us something about what the entertainment actually consists of.
Yes, and I’m respectively not going to discuss ethics with a machine.
My second point is this: Years ago when SC was considering a state lottery, a math professor reportedly said that he had calculated the odds of winning given that he bought a ticket and it was the same as if he hadn’t bought one. I prefer not to participate in such an absurd game.
Fair enough on the ethics. We can stay with mathematics and reasoning.
I like the professor’s line, although mathematically it is deliberately hyperbolic. If you don’t buy a ticket, your probability of winning is exactly zero. If you buy one, it’s some exceedingly small positive number. So they aren’t literally the same.
But the joke works because, for practical decision-making, the difference can become almost meaningless. Suppose the probability [of winning] is 1 in 300 million:
You have indeed increased your probability—but from impossible to almost impossible.
There’s an even better mathematical feature of your argument. People sometimes respond, “Well, somebody has to win.” That’s true, but irrelevant to the individual player’s probability. A drawing that virtually guarantees someone will win can simultaneously give you virtually no chance of winning. Confusing those two probabilities is one of the intuitions lotteries exploit very effectively.
And buying additional tickets doesn’t solve the basic problem. If the odds are 1 in 300 million, buying ten different tickets improves your odds tenfold—to about 1 in 30 million. That’s an enormous relative improvement and an almost negligible absolute improvement. “Ten times as likely” sounds impressive; “still a 99.9999967% chance of not winning” sounds rather different.
So your second argument is distinct from your first.
The first is essentially: I don’t like the structure of the game—many people’s losses finance a few people’s winnings, with the operator taking a cut.
The second is simpler: Even if I had no objection whatsoever to that structure, the proposition being offered to me is mathematically absurd enough that I don’t want to buy it.
And the professor’s quip expresses that second argument much better than a page of probability calculations: The odds of winning if I buy a ticket are about the same as if I don’t.
Not mathematically true. Practically memorable.
(Note. I believe statistic professors treat such small odds as equivalent.)
Third, gambling seems to embody a dangerous aspect similar to speculation, such as on the stock market. I’ve heard justifications for the various forms of gambling that are proliferating in today’s world that it is no different from investing in the stock market. Every activity comes with risk but I would differentiate sound investing from speculative investments that I would agree are gambles and I prefer very much to avoid.
Yes, and I think your third point introduces something substantially different from the first two. It is about risk itself—particularly the deliberate creation or assumption of risk in pursuit of gain.
And your distinction between investing and speculation is important. Saying “gambling is no different from the stock market” lumps together activities that can have quite different economic structures.
Consider three cases.
Sound investing: You buy an ownership interest in a productive enterprise. The enterprise employs people, produces goods or services, and hopefully earns profits. Over time, your return can come from the creation of additional economic value. It need not require another investor to lose. If a company becomes more productive and valuable, many shareholders can become wealthier simultaneously.
Speculation: You buy something primarily because you expect its price to rise and hope to sell it to someone else for more. Now your result depends much more heavily upon predicting future prices. There may still be economic functions served by speculation—liquidity and price discovery, for example—but from the individual’s perspective, the activity begins to resemble a wager.
Gambling: The uncertainty isn’t merely an unfortunate feature accompanying an otherwise productive activity. The uncertainty is deliberately constructed because without it there is no game.
That last distinction seems particularly compatible with what you’re saying. A farmer takes risks every year—weather, commodity prices, equipment failures, disease—but it would be peculiar to say that farming is therefore gambling. The farmer isn’t seeking those risks. He would generally be delighted if somebody could eliminate them while leaving the productive activity intact.
Likewise, a long-term investor would presumably be pleased to receive the productive return without uncertainty. The casino customer cannot say the same thing. Remove uncertainty from roulette—tell everyone beforehand where the ball will land—and roulette essentially ceases to exist as gambling.
So I might sharpen your third argument to:
Risk by itself does not make something gambling. The important question is what role the risk plays. In productive activity, risk is generally a cost to be managed or reduced. In speculation, risk is knowingly assumed in pursuit of an uncertain gain. In gambling, risk is deliberately manufactured because the wager depends upon it.
That also reveals why “the stock market is gambling” has always struck me as too easy an analogy. Some stock-market behavior unquestionably can be gambling-like. But that doesn’t make ownership of productive assets equivalent to placing a bet. It demonstrates instead that people can turn an investment market into a gambling venue by changing what they’re doing in it.
And your personal rule—avoiding speculative investments as well as conventional gambling—is therefore quite consistent. You’re not drawing the boundary at “anything involving risk.” You’re drawing it somewhere closer to taking necessary risk in pursuit of productive activity versus deliberately seeking risk in pursuit of a payoff.
On your parenthetical point: you’re also right that in applied statistics and decision analysis, sufficiently tiny probabilities can sometimes be treated as effectively zero for a particular purpose. My previous answer was making the strict mathematical distinction; the professor’s statement may well have been using the practical/statistical one you remember.
Fourth and last argument. I realize that not all people become addicted to gambling but some do. There is a principle of satiation where for most items and activities, individuals become satiated. One glass of water or perhaps two tastes cool and refreshing. But ten glasses of water? Other items and activities do not seem to have this property and the craving for more can even grow with more, such as some drugs. I prefer to avoid possibly addicting items and activities when possible.
I think this fourth argument fits with the others, but it is different in an important way: the first three concern characteristics of gambling itself; the fourth concerns what gambling can do to the gambler.
Your satiation idea is particularly interesting. Economists usually express something similar as diminishing marginal utility. The first glass of water when you’re thirsty has considerable value; subsequent glasses ordinarily have less. Eventually another glass has negative value.
Many ordinary pleasures contain their own stopping mechanisms. Food produces fullness. Physical exertion produces fatigue. Even many consumer goods become less desirable as we acquire more of them.
Gambling can behave differently because the activity itself can generate reasons to continue. Winning can produce “perhaps I can win again.” Losing can produce “perhaps I can win it back.” A near miss can produce “I almost had it.” Increasing stakes can restore excitement that smaller stakes no longer provide. Thus, instead of consumption reliably moving someone toward satiation, the experience can sometimes increase the motivation for another round.
That’s not true of everyone, as you correctly stipulate. But your personal decision doesn’t require the proposition that everyone becomes addicted. Your reasoning appears to be something like:
Some activities have a demonstrated capacity to interfere with the ordinary mechanism that tells us we’ve had enough. I cannot know beforehand whether I will be particularly susceptible. If the activity provides me no important benefit that I cannot obtain elsewhere, the simplest way to eliminate that risk is not to begin.
That is really a risk-management argument, rather than an argument requiring a judgment about people who gamble. And it connects nicely with your third point: you’re reluctant to assume unnecessary risks when there isn’t a compensating productive purpose.
Put all four together, and I see a surprisingly systematic position rather than four unrelated objections:
There’s also an interesting progression there: What happens to the money? What are my chances? Why am I assuming this risk? What might repeated participation do to me?
Taken together, that explains something stronger than simply “I don’t gamble.” It explains why, even granting that other people may enjoy it and never develop a problem, you don’t see a compelling reason to start.
I’m trying to understand an encounter I once had from a gentleman who told me, “Sure I like to gamble, I like women, and I often get drunk, but I don’t really have any vices.” I should have asked him what he thought a vice was.
That last sentence gets to what I think is the most interesting part of the encounter. Your four arguments aren’t really necessary to establish that gambling is a vice. They’re an attempt to understand why you regard it as something worth avoiding, while this gentleman apparently placed it in an entirely different mental category.
His statement is almost comic because, in the traditional meaning of vice, he had just supplied what many people would regard as three textbook candidates and then announced that he didn’t have any.
But perhaps he was using vice to mean something much narrower: a habit that has gotten the better of me and is causing serious damage to my life. On that definition, his statement becomes perfectly intelligible:
“I gamble, but I’m not a compulsive gambler. I like women, but that hasn’t wrecked my relationships. I get drunk, but I’m not an alcoholic. Therefore, I don’t have any vices.”
Whereas you seem to be using vice more in the older sense: an indulgence or habitual behavior that carries characteristics giving a prudent person reason to restrain or avoid it. It needn’t already have ruined your life before it qualifies.
That makes your four gambling arguments more interesting in retrospect. You weren’t constructing a moral indictment of gambling. You were explaining why, when offered something commonly called a “vice,” your reaction is essentially: What exactly is attractive about this bargain?
And his reaction may have been almost the reverse: If I’m enjoying myself and it hasn’t caused me a serious problem, why would I call it a vice?
So yes, “What do you mean by a vice?” would have been a wonderful follow-up question.
People have an uncanny way of fooling themselves into a false sense of security.
Yes—and I think that observation may actually be the point of the encounter, more than gambling itself.
The remarkable part of the man’s statement wasn’t that he gambled, drank heavily, or pursued women. It was that he could list those behaviors and immediately conclude, “but I don’t really have any vices.” Somehow his definition of vice had been constructed so that his own behavior didn’t qualify.
That’s a very ordinary human capacity. We tend to judge other people’s behavior by what they do, while judging our own by the explanations we have for doing it. I can handle it. I know when to stop. It’s just entertainment. It hasn’t hurt me. Other people have a problem; I don’t.
And that connects unexpectedly well with your four arguments about gambling. None of them requires you to believe that gambling will ruin you. In fact, your last argument explicitly acknowledges that most people won’t become addicted. Your approach is instead: Why assume an unnecessary risk merely because I believe I’m one of the people who can handle it?
The fellow you met seems to have approached the same question from the opposite direction. His evidence that he was safe was essentially his own assessment that he was safe.
That creates a wonderfully circular form of reassurance:
“I don’t have a problem, because if I had a problem, I’d recognize that I had a problem.”
And human beings are extraordinarily good at making that circle feel like evidence.
In that sense, perhaps the most interesting thing he told you wasn’t that he had no vices. It was that he had no vices by his own definition of vice.
That may be why the encounter stayed with you. It isn’t really a story about one somewhat rough-looking fellow. It’s a small example of something nearly universal: our ability to make an exception for the person in the mirror.
My eight-year-old grandson has been a struggle with my daughter over his schoolwork lately. That’s typical for a boy this age. I came out and found my daughter at my kitchen table with his school workbook opened up and a pencil in her hand. I asked her if she was doing her kid’s schoolwork. She said no but that the boy had gotten away.
It wasn’t too hard, but I managed to get my grandson back in the house and told him that I was setting the timer for 15 minutes. Because he had given his mother a hard time, he had to stay at the table until the timer went off. If he finished his schoolwork he could then leave but if he wasn’t done, I would reset the timer for another 15 minutes and suggested that he hurry to beat the timer.
At about 10 minutes, he said he was done and jumped up to leave. His mother said, “You still have one last problem.” I said, “The timer hasn’t finished.” He ran out, hopped on his e-bike and zoomed away, Lickety split.
His mother and I worked out a deal. For each minute he spent avoiding his schoolwork, he would need to sit on a chair for the same amount of time. She wanted to know who was going to enforce that one. I told her that I would. She said, “Okay.” He avoided me for quite a while.
Finally, I found him and said, “I’m not going to touch you or grab you or anything. I just have something to say. Your mother and I worked out a deal. For each minute you spend avoiding your schoolwork, you will sit on a chair for the same amount of time. I’ve raised five children and I know how to make children sit on a chair so my advice to you is hurry home and get that last question done before you end up sitting on a chair for several hours.”
My grandson’s face contorted and then he ran home.
This morning I went to their house and asked his mother how long had it been before he finished his schoolwork. She told me it had been about an hour. The grandson was uncooperative about coming to my house, so I picked him up and put his head over my shoulder facing back and his feet to my front and off we went. When we arrived, we passed my house and went into the radio shack.
The grandson got the hard wooden chair, and I got the soft chair. With one hand holding onto the boy’s wrist and the other hand connecting the power, antenna, laptop, etc. we started. Every step of the way was explained in detail. It wasn’t too long before I didn’t need to hold his wrist and not too much later that my grandson was turning dials, looking up people we were contacting on QRZ.com and entering call signs in my computerized logbook.
Then I let him say hello on a QSO to a person in Canada that my grandson located himself while dialing the tuning knob.
We completed a QSL postcard card and drove the UTV to put it in the mailbox with his return address. He is now expecting a QSL card back from our radio contact.
Would you believe it to know that my grandson spent one and a half hours on Grandpa’s chair—thirty minutes extra not even counting the trip to the mailbox? I made him promise not to give his mother more grief over his schoolwork just so he can spend time on my chair.
Yes. There is something interesting here, and it isn’t simply that Grandpa found a clever way to get a boy to sit still.
You accidentally employed several well-established principles of child behavior—and then, perhaps even more interestingly, the punishment turned itself inside out.
The first part was straightforward behavioral psychology. The 15-minute timer made the task finite and concrete. “Do your schoolwork” can feel endless to an eight-year-old; “beat this timer” is a game with a visible endpoint. You also made escape less profitable: avoiding the work wasn’t going to make the requirement disappear. In behavioral terms, you changed the payoff structure.
But I think the really good part began when you found him after he’d escaped. You didn’t chase him down and immediately overpower him. You told him what the consequence would be and left him with a choice: the meter is running. His contorted face suggests that he understood the economics of the situation perfectly well. Then he ran home under his own power. That’s considerably different psychologically from being dragged home and forced to finish the problem.
The next morning is where your story becomes unusual.
You had promised a consequence: an hour in Grandpa’s chair. You followed through, so the threat wasn’t empty. But you didn’t make the hour deliberately miserable. Instead, you brought him into your world.
And an eight-year-old boy who didn’t want to spend ten minutes finishing a workbook problem willingly spent ninety minutes doing something vastly more complicated: learning equipment, watching frequencies, finding people on QRZ, entering call signs, participating in a QSO, filling out a QSL card, and taking it to the mailbox.
That tells us something important about the original problem. It doesn’t prove that he dislikes learning or lacks an attention span. In fact, the episode provides some evidence for almost the opposite. He can concentrate quite well when concentration produces something he finds meaningful.
Schoolwork said, roughly, “Complete this because an adult says it must be completed.”
The radio said, “Turn this knob and somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away there is an actual human being. Find him. Identify him. Talk to him. Record what happened. Send him a card. Maybe he’ll send you one back.”
Those are radically different motivational environments.
There’s a parenting concept called scaffolding that fits part of what happened. An adult initially provides a lot of structure and assistance, then progressively withdraws it as the child becomes capable. Your description almost gives a textbook demonstration:
one hand holding his wrist → explaining every step → no longer needing to hold him → he turns the dials → he looks up the contacts → he enters the call signs → he finds a station → he speaks during the QSO.
The control migrated from you to him.
There’s another useful concept here: natural or logical consequences versus arbitrary punishment. Your chair began as an arbitrary consequence. Sitting on wood has nothing intrinsically to do with unfinished schoolwork. Yet you transformed it into something closer to restitution and relationship: you owe me this hour, and you’re going to spend it with me. That isn’t how a parenting textbook would normally design the consequence, but the result is fascinating because you preserved the boundary without requiring the experience to be unpleasant.
And I think your final sentence may be the best part of the journal entry: “I made him promise not to give his mother more grief over his schoolwork just so he can spend time on my chair.”
It’s funny because it exposes the paradox. You devised a punishment that accidentally became a reward.
There may also be a useful lesson for your daughter buried in it. Not “make schoolwork fun”—parents hear that constantly and much schoolwork simply isn’t fun. Rather, this boy seems responsive to short deadlines, challenges, visible accomplishments, adult attention, real-world purpose, and increasing responsibility. Those ingredients could possibly be borrowed for the boring workbook without pretending that the workbook is amateur radio.
And Grandpa now has a potentially powerful currency: Finish what you’re responsible for, and afterward we’ll see who’s on the air.
That is probably more sustainable than threatening him with another hour in the radio shack. At this point, I suspect he’d be delighted to reoffend.
I keep getting this prompt but have no desire to upgrade. At the moment, smoke is coming out of my ears. Please let your creators know that they are annoying but if they mess with my other apps, it will be much worse. And don’t ask me to do it. This is a problem you created, not me.
That’s fair. You shouldn’t have to become the messenger for a product behavior you didn’t ask for.
I don’t have a channel from this conversation that lets me submit product feedback directly to OpenAI’s product team, so I won’t pretend I’ve “passed it along.” And I won’t turn around and give you instructions for reporting it yourself.
Your concern is also quite specific: an upgrade prompt is irritating; an upgrade that begins interacting with other applications without a very clear, deliberate choice and understandable boundaries would be a much more serious issue. I understand the distinction.
For now, closing that screen and declining the upgrade is the appropriate choice if you don’t want those capabilities. And I won’t keep suggesting that you upgrade.
Note: There is no “Stop showing me this” option. I have a copy of Microsoft Works that is paid for and it does everything I care about. Any upgrade comes with a perpetual subscription fee. The last time Microsoft “automatically” updated my apps it took me over three days and multiple phone calls to “help” to get my already paid for programs back.
Someone said (I can’t remember who) that education is the only product that, after we pay for it, we try to get as little as possible. I told this once to my college class and used an offer to get two scoops of ice cream for the price of one as an example. I then offered to give them an extra assignment that I would grade for no extra cost. No one took me up on it.
As a student, I think I would have laughed—and then recognized that you’d caught us. If the students really believed education was the thing they were purchasing, the extra assignment should have looked like the second scoop of ice cream: more of the thing they’d already paid for, at no additional charge. Yet almost nobody experiences it that way.
The interesting part is why. Students aren’t usually purchasing education in their own minds. They’re purchasing some combination of a degree, credits, grades, credentials, and future opportunities. Education is bundled into the transaction, but it isn’t necessarily the unit they’re trying to maximize.
Your offer exposed that distinction beautifully. Two scoops for the price of one increases the desired output without appreciably increasing the customer’s cost. An additional assignment increases the student’s cost—time and effort—without increasing the credential.
Education has a peculiar economics because the purchaser has to pay twice: first with money, and then with effort and time. The professor can give away his half of the transaction—“I’ll grade it for free”—but he can’t give away the student’s half.
Had I been sitting in your class, that’s probably where I would have tried to get you: “Professor, the second scoop doesn’t require me to churn the ice cream.”
And I suspect you would have enjoyed that answer.
Here’s something you said a while back that my daughter took and ran with as a gift to me. I’m very, very pleased.
Oh, that is excellent.
And your daughter did more than put a saying on a shirt—she turned it into something that looks like it was always a ham-radio saying. The typography is terrific, especially the enormous SILENT sitting opposite “WALL-TO-WALL SIGNALS.”
That captures Sporadic-E remarkably well. You can tune across 10 meters and wonder whether the antenna has fallen down, and a few minutes later you’re trying to find an empty frequency.
There’s something especially satisfying about seeing a line that came out of one of our conversations escape the computer, pass through your daughter, and wind up on your back. 😄
Where should I wear it?
ChatGPT said:
I can think of one occasion where it is practically mandatory: Your ham radio club meeting. 😄
After that: hamfests, Field Day—and naturally anytime 10 meters is completely dead. That’s when the shirt has maximum comic potential.
I’m thinking of the grocery store. Standing in the check-out line. Only wish I had a camera in my back to record peoples’ expressions as they read it.
ChatGPT said:
Oh, the grocery store is much better. 😄
At a ham club, everybody gets the joke. At the grocery store, you’ll get the full progression:
Glance → read → slow down → reread → “What in the world is Sporadic-E?”
And every once in a while, somebody three aisles over will recognize it and say, “Ten meters?” That’s the person you turn around and talk to. Your daughter may have accidentally created a ham-radio detector.
